Charter schools' press vs. reality
The Aug. 24 Chronicle carried a naively enthusiastic feature about a Leadership charter high school.
Leadership Public Schools (LPS) is a chain created by Mark Kushner, founding principal of San Francisco's struggling Leadership High School, an 8-year-old charter.
Kushner has been going around the Bay Area peddling charter schools. If a district school board rejects his proposal, he goes over its head to the county or the state Board of Education. That means a school district is likely to have a charter school forced on it against its will. This is happening right now with Leadership campuses in Hayward and Campbell. (LPS also runs schools in Oakland, Richmond and East San Jose.)
Kushner has been citing the supposed success of San Francisco's Leadership as a key selling point (SFUSD's Leadership, though founded by Kushner, is not technically part of LPS.)
But actually, Leadership in SFUSD has fallen on hard times. Its test scores have dropped. It has slid off the radar of aware parents looking for high schools even when they're in the immediate area &mdash something I'm directly familiar with as the parent of a 2005 graduate of SFUSD's Aptos Middle School, in the same part of town as Leadership. A number of my son's classmates are going to other charter high schools, but none even mentioned Leadership, despite its formerly impressive reputation and its proximity to Aptos.
Meanwhile, the San Francisco Leadership recently went to the SFUSD Board of Education seeking to become a non-charter district school, because it can no longer manage its own administrative affairs. The catch was, Leadership wants to maintain the freedom of a charter school (primarily meaning the freedom to avoid a union contract), while handing off the responsibility to manage its own administration. That request is currently in limbo, with the Board of Ed just returning from its summer hiatus and critical labor issues taking top priority.
A March 2005 editorial in the San Jose Mercury News blasted the Campbell school district for rejecting a Leadership school &mdash and cited the supposed success of Leadership's San Francisco charter (engaging along the way in some unbecoming race-baiting).
Leadership's primary claim to success, by the way, is based on the San Francisco school's graduates' supposed college admission rates &mdash something that as far as I can tell is entirely unconfirmable.
It may be that Kushner has finally judged it ill-advised to continue touting Leadership's San Francisco school now that its problems are prominent enough to show up in an Internet search. The Aug. 24 Chronicle story didn't mention the existence of a San Francisco campus.
I attended a panel discussion on charter schools at San Francisco's Commonwealth Club earlier this week. (Click "comments" on this blog item to read my informal description of the event.) The moderator invited written questions from the audience. I asked whether a charter school can ever work effectively with its school district if the charter school has been forced upon the unwilling district &mdash something that has happened in numerous other situations besides the Hayward and Campbell Leaderhip brouhahas.
San Francisco BOE veteran Jill Wynns, the Commonwealth panel's charter-school skeptic, responded simply: "No." Charter advocate Caprice Young, head of the California Charter Schools Association, seemed caught off-guard and mumbled something about how they'd eventually learn to get along. Young didn't exactly deliver a ringing vote of confidence for the ability of a charter school and a district to work together effectively in a situation that begins in a hostile standoff, as in Hayward and Campbell.
In a similar situation early this year, a bare majority of the SFUSD BOE approved a second Envision Schools charter in our district even as Envision's initial school &mdash its supposed showcase, Marin Arts & Technology in Novato &mdash is stumbling badly. July news reports announced that the Novato school district has put MAT on notice that it had better shape up or it's outta there.
MAT &mdash which posts far lower test scores, including on the crucial Similar Schools index, than Novato's two other high schools &mdash was warned to improve student discipline and special-education practices. In SFUSD, Envision runs year-old City Arts & Technology and will open Metro Arts & Technology this fall &mdash its only two schools besides the Novato campus. Envision is bounteously supported by the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation and other funders.
California's students would be better served if the press, the public and funders cast a more skeptical eye on operations like Leadership and Envision &mdash and on the charter movement in general.&mdash Caroline
Labels: Special Education
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From Caroline, here's a commentary I wrote on Aug. 22 on the Commonwealth Club panel mentioned in the blog item.
...
I attended last night's discussion on charter schools at the
Commonwealth Club and (due to a busy day and overload) decided not to
distract myself by taking notes. I still want to share what I heard,
and now wish I had notes. So I'm just jotting down impressions instead.
The panelists were Jill Wynns as charter school skeptic; Caprice
Young, leader of the Calif. Charter Schools Assn., as advocate; and
Ron Zimmer of the RAND Corp. as sort of academic
researcher/interpreter. [Zimmer co-authored a study of charter schools
that overall found that charter schools perform about the same as
non-charter schools. One side finding was that "non-classroom-based"
charter schools, such as independent study, distance learning and home
study schools, achieved poorer results (based on test scores).]
The Commonwealth Club format works efficiently. It offers the
panelists a chance to respond to each other without locking them into
rigid requirements or time limits, so that every point or response any
panelist wanted to make did get made (or so it appeared), and there
was no blather just for the sake of filling up allotted time. The
program seemed to organically take up the allotted 90 minutes perfectly.
So, random impressions:
-- Caprice Young explained that charter schools are public schools.
Jill Wynns responded to redefine that. She said that charter schools
are largely publicly funded but privately run. She compared it to
privately run hospitals that get public funding -- they are still not
public hospitals.
-- Wynns pointed out that more of the charter schools that show
long-range stability tend to be not the community-based schools that
were purportedly envisioned by the movement's founders, but those run
by private operators such as Envision, Aspire, Green Dot and others.
Thus they constitute school systems parallel to public-school systems,
except run without being run by democratic process.
These organizations are self-described as Education Management
Organizations, or EMOs, after HMOs (Wynns said wryly that we all know
how well HMOs are doing).
Young didn't really dispute her.
-- Wynns claimed that the SFUSD BOE spends 10-20% of its time on
charter schools, even though only 4% of SFUSD students attend charter
schools.
-- Wynns pointed out that one major function of a school board is to
determine how many schools the community needs -- a basic for managing
costs -- and implied that the imposition of charter schools harms the
ability to make that calculation.
-- Young said that charter schools suffer financially because they
have to provide their own sites.
Wynns responded that under Prop. 39, school districts have to find
sites for charters (I think they can charge rent, but have to provide
the site), which poses a major hardship on school districts.
-- Young said charter schools are necessary because school districts
haven't been responsive enough to parents' demands for innovative
programs.
-- Young talked about the popularity of KIPP schools, and said that
they all have long waiting lists. Wynns didn't respond at the time --
but should have -- to point out that in SFUSD, the KIPP schools do NOT
have waiting lists. That's not really a reflection on KIPP but due to
the fact that they start at 5th grade, and most parents don't want to
move their kids before the last year at their K-5 school. (The last
year and graduation are exciting, and kids have established friends
and communities! What was KIPP thinking?) Anyway, my addition is to
point out that Young declared confidently that all KIPP schools have
waiting list, in a city where the KIPP schools do NOT have waiting
lists, which to me calls into question her credibility period, amiable
though she is.
-- Zimmer spoke on various factual points. Interestingly, I think
every time he spoke up on one of the other panelists, it was to back
up Wynns and dispute Young. I can't think of a single time it was the
opposite.
The format allowed for written questions. I couldn't tell whether
every question that was submitted was read, but I think so -- which is
interesting, because every question had a skeptical tone toward
charter schools. I'll just describe the two I submitted (paraphrasing
them):
-- Charter schools were intended to try out innovations that public
schools could then emulate. What innovations have been pioneered at
charter schools that public schools can emulate?
Young (surprisingly unprepared!) mentioned two features that are not
in any way innovations. One was foreign language in early grades.
Aside from SFUSD's immersion programs, which start at kindergarten --
sheesh, I had Spanish starting in third grade in California public
school. It's Prop. 13 that led to the elimination of general foreign
language in early grades. She also mentioned cored classes in
secondary schools -- meaning just what goes on at my kids' non-charter
middle school, where one teacher teaches both math/science and one
teacher teaches both language arts/social studies, so the student
doesn't bounce from teacher to teacher. It's nice, and also not an
innovation. I understand it also may create some violations of the
credentialing requirements at high school level under No Child Left
Behind.
Clearly, Young couldn't think of any actual innovations.
-- I also asked: It's currently common, when a school district turns
down a charter proposal, for the prospective charter operator to go to
the county or state board of ed to get a charter, thus forcing a
charter school into an unwilling district. Can a charter school have
good relations with the district it's in under those circumstances?
Wynns said flatly: No. Young kind of mumbled something to the effect
that someday they'd learn to get along. It was seriously lame.
-- I have to note again that Young is a professional advocate who did
this presentation on paid time, while Wynns (who serves on the SFUSD
board of ed for a $500/month honorarium) did it as a volunteer. To me
this is a huge distinction that should be specified in the
introduction and emblazoned on the informational materials. It implies
that the professional would be better prepared and informed -- yet it
cuts both ways, because we also don't know if the professional
actually believes what she's saying or is just doing her job. It's a
given that the volunteer is a committed advocate for her cause.
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